In a column for CNN, editor-at-large Chris Cillizza had little patience for Republican lawmakers' knee-jerk response to the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that took the lives of 13 U.S. military members as well as over 170 Afghans on Thursday, saying their demand that President Joe Biden should immediately resign shouldn't be taken seriously.
With conservative rabble-rousers like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) calling for Biden's impeachment, some Republican senators called for Biden to step aside.
Echoing conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, who wrote at the Bulwark, "As far as I can remember, Democrats did not demand GW's resignation (or impeachment) after 9/11. Nor was there a clamor for Reagan's head the day that 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon. There was fierce criticism, but no one discussed the 25th Amendment. The Bay of Pigs was an epic disaster, but Republicans did not (as far as I remember) immediately call for JFK's resignation," Cillizza agreed.
Singling out Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cillizza wrote, "None of it [the terrorist attack] is grounds for Biden to resign his office -- as Republican elected officials fell all over themselves to demand even as the casualties from the suicide bombings in Afghanistan were still being tabulated."
Calling the very notion of Biden's resignation "ridiculous," he explained, "There was a time not that long ago where NO politician would even consider calling publicly for the resignation of a president while the number of American casualties were still being counted. It would have been considered abhorrent -- playing politics on a day when we are all Americans first and members of a political party second."
The CNN analyst blamed the frenzied response on former president Donald Trump for setting a lowered standard where "....there is now no compunction about politicizing the deaths of Americans on a mission abroad. Everything is now political from the second it happens."
Like the conservative Sykes, Cillizza asked, "Do the members calling for Biden's resignation actually believe that a tragedy happening -- either in this country or abroad -- is grounds for resignation? By that standard, George W. Bush should have resigned on September 12, 2001. Franklin Delano Roosevelt should have resigned after Pearl Harbor. Bill Clinton should have resigned after the Oklahoma City bombing."
Accusing the GOP lawmakers of grandstanding, Cillizza concluded, "The Republican politicians calling for Biden's resignation know, of course, that he isn't going to step aside. That they do it anyway, knowing that the base of their party will not just tolerate it but celebrate them for it suggests how far our politics have fallen from even a decade or two ago."
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